


Mercy

by Anonymous



Category: Sleepy Hollow (1999)
Genre: Alternate Ending, Dark, F/F, Femslash, Witchcraft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-16
Updated: 2019-06-16
Packaged: 2020-05-12 19:33:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,529
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19235686
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: “Please, my lady...please spare me. I entreat you for all I am worth. I am in your power, I beg you allow me to live," Katrina sobs.Anything to be spared the Hessian's sword.But there is only one thing the Lady Van Tassel wants.





	Mercy

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this years ago, and am only just getting around to posting it

“Dear stepdaughter…you look as if you’d seen a ghost!”

Katrina’s mind reels. The death of her father, the departure of Ichabod, and the sudden apparition of her murdered stepmother are all too much for the poor girl. Her vision blurs, the face of Lady Van Tassel slowly melting into an overwhelming grey haze, and then vanishing into the all-consuming black of unconsciousness.

* * *

It might be minutes, or hours, before Katrina comes to. Time is lost in the dreamless dark She blinks once, then twice. Her head throbs, as if struck by a falling brick. Katrina stirs, propping herself up on her left arm, and waits for the cobwebs of sleep to clear away. The cavernous interior of her father’s windmill hangs over her, bursting with dark shadow, save for the little fire kindled in their midst. And kneeling before that beacon of light in a sea of gloom, is her miraculously resurrected stepmother.

“Awake at last”. Lady Van Tassel does not even turn to look at the young girl. “Did you think it was all a nasty dream?” she taunts, voice dripping with scorn.

“Father saw the horseman kill you,” Katrina breathes, eyes still glittering with disbelief.

“He saw the horseman come towards me with his sword unsheathed”, Mary Van Tassel explains, her words laden with the elation of victory. “But it is I who govern the horseman my dear, and Baltus did not stay to watch.”

“But the body…”

“The servant girl, Sarah,” Mary says with a giggle. “I always thought she was useless. But it seems she had a purpose after all.”

“Who are you?” The revelation pierces Katrina like a volley of arrows. Mary had treated her like her own, she had been kind, and never cruel. She had taken her for picnics, read to her, played games with her, but through it all never tried to usurp the place her birth mother would always hold in Katrina’s heart. The woman before her now, glorying in the horrors she had committed, and thrilled at the prospect of more to come, bore no resemblance to the one who’d shared Katrina’s home for so long.

“My family name was Archer”.

Mary turns her back on Katrina, again, framed by the fire’s warm glow.

A picture flashes through the girl’s mind. An old carving in the ancient stone of a crumbling fireplace.

“The archer…”

“I lived with my father and mother and sister in a cottage not far from here, until one day my father died. The landlord, who had received many years of loyal service from my parents, evicted us. No one in this God-fearing town would take us in, because my mother was suspected of witchcraft. But she schooled her daughters well, while we lived as outcasts in the Western Woods. She died within a year.”

Mary presses the fingers of her gloved hands together, eyes blank, staring beyond Katrina, and the windmill, and even the forests beyond, devoured from the inside out by the injustices visited upon her in days past.

“My sister and I remained there, in our refuge, until one day, while gathering firewood…we crossed the path of the Hessian.”

A draft howls through the slats in the windmill’s construction, chilling Katrina to her core, but evidently sparing the Lady.

“I saw his death. At that moment, I offered my soul to Satan if he would raise the Hessian from the grave to avenge me.”

“Avenge you?”

“Against Van Garrett. The landlord who showed us no mercy and left us to starve whilst Baltus Van Tassel, and his simpering wife and girl child stole our home.”

As she spits the words “girl child”, she fixes Katrina with the most hateful, most withering of gazes. Katrina’s heart sinks in her chest, constricted as if held in a crushing fist. She will receive as much mercy as Mary perceived she had received herself.

“I swore I would make myself mistress of all he had” Mary continues. “The easiest part was the first. To enter his house as your mother’s sick-nurse, put her body into the grave, and my own into the marriage bed. Not quite so easy was to secure my legacy. The widow had to go, of course. And the servant Masbath. And then just the other day, that silly Midwife Killian told me the widow had told her a big secret! And she told me this right in front of her husband! What a goose! So…another little job for the horseman.”

She gives another short laugh at the recollection of the Killians’ murders.

Katrina watches in sheer disbelief. There is not a hint of remorse in her stepmother’s voice. Neither is there any fear of reprisal, in this world or the next. The now orphaned heiress to the Van Tassel feels on the verge of vomiting. That one so evil, so devoid of humanity could have haunted her home for so long, could have _murdered her mother,_ so well dissembling her true nature is terrifying. She had always maintained a belief in the basic goodness of mankind. How could she any longer?

“But lust delivered the Reverend Steenwyck into my power; fear did the same for the Notary Hardenbrook, and the Drunken Philipse. And the doctor’s silence I exchanged for my complicity in his fornications with the servant girl, Sarah…”

“Yes…you have everything now.”

“No!” Mary says quickly, lips curling into a sneer.“You have, my dear! I get everything in the event of your death…”

Lady Van Tassel stalks closer, coiled like a predatory cat about to strike. Katrina thinks to back away, before she remembers the cellar she would tumble into. She cannot hold back any longer the tears she has suppressed. Her father is dead, her mother is dead, Ichabod is gone. She has nothing left, and her only company is this madwoman who murdered both her parents and so many others.

“Please…please don’t kill me…” she manages, through ragged sobs.

Mary kneels down, brushing a strand of Katrina’s golden hair from her face. She wipes a tear from the girl’s eye, in cold mockery of a mother’s affection.

“I won’t have to, my dear! I’ve my horseman to do that for me.”

Katrina’s eyes go wide. She remembers the black rider, astride his monstrous stallion, hellish sword unsheathed. This is the end, then. Nothing could stop the phantom when he determined to take a head. Not blades, not muskets, not begging. She would suffer the same fate her father had. She had always hoped, since childhood, that the last sound she would hear on this earth would be the song of a cardinal. Instead, it would be the hiss of the Hessian’s merciless sword.

Her eyes dart about frantically, as if she will find a savior, or some escape, in the shadows of the windmill.

Lady Van Tassel laughs, a laughter thick with triumph and mirth.

“What are you searching for, love? Do you expect anything can save you now? Your detective friend is likely halfway to New York.” She cups Katrina’s face in her hands, the cold leather pressing against warm, flushed, tear-streaked skin. “Oh darling, don’t cry! There are worse deaths, you know. Ask the French, beheading is kindest of executions.”

Another gust of wind, louder and sharper than the last, explodes through the cellar doors and into the windmill, shaking the old structure on its foundations. This time, even Mary seems frazzled, though she quickly regains her stately bearing.

Then comes another sound, far more terrible than the first. The unmistakable thunder of approaching hoof-beats.

Katrina’s heart catches in her throat, the world seeming to come to a standstill as her pupils dilate with terror. For a moment, she considers jumping to her feet, pushing Mary aside, and running for her life. But it would be in vain. She could never escape her stepmother’s demonic thrall. And even if she could, what would she have to return to? A dead father, an empty house, a murdered mother, and a vanished love. So she does not run. She barely moves. She pulls her knees up to her chest, and does something she has not partaken in since she was small.

She prays.

“Oh my God, in Heaven, please hel-“

Her plea is cut short before it has a chance to begin in earnest by the sharp, jeering laughter of Lady Van Tassel.

“Oh my! Are you praying? If there’s anything I’ve come to now, it’s that the god you and this little town, and every other fool in Christendom worship, is a powerless phantom. A specter for hypocrites like Steenwyck to parade around and manipulate for their own benefit.And even if he wasn’t…do you think he’d help a little witch like you?”

The hoof-beats stop, replaced by the steady drum of heavy boots on hard-packed ground, and the jingling of spurs.

Katrina is almost tempted to fling herself into Mary’s arms, as she had done occasionally when young. She is, after all, the only bastion of familiarity in the twisted nightmare her life has become.

Katrina rises to her feet, steps forward, and then sinks to her knees again, grasping the hem of Mary’s dress in trembling hands.

Behind her, the horseman ascends the cellar steps, growing ever closer. After a long, agonizing eternity, the dark shape of the Hessian appears at the peak of the stairs. His glittering sword, tempered in the fires of hell, is already gripped in his right hand, thirsting for flesh and bone. His great black cape billows out behind him, like the wings of some monstrous bat. He takes one heavy step forward. Two steps to Katrina.

“Please, stepmother, _please_! Anything, anything! I’ll not contest your right to the fortune. Please don’t let him take me! I beg of you, I _beg_!”

Another twisted smile comes over the face of Lady Van Tassel. She raises one delicate hand, and the Horseman stops in his tracks. He lowers the sword, tentatively, but comes no further.

“You beg me, is that right?”

“Yes…yes…I-“

“Well, dear” Mary chirps, running a hand through Katrina’s hair. “Tell you what, beg me a bit more and I’ll consider calling off the hound.”

The Horseman twitches, as if offended by his mistress’s words. Still, though, he does nothing.

Katrina lowers her head, body trembling with fear, in a gesture of quiet submission. With the hem of Mary’s dress still clutched tightly in her hands, she continues her pleading.

“Please, my lady...please spare me. I entreat you for all I am worth. I am in your power, I _beg_ you allow me to live," Katrina sobs. 

The Lady Van Tassel teases out a few strands of golden hair from Katrina’s pretty locks, running them in between her index finger and thumb.

“Now…speaking in the abstract, of course, if I were to spare your pretty little head…what would I have to gain?”

Katrina thinks for a moment, bosom heaving as she sucks in breath after breath of air, hoping to quell her terror.

“Anything you desire…anything you desire that is in my power to do, I swear it.”

Mary reaches down, and takes her stepdaughter’s hand in her own. She caresses Katrina’s palm, running a gloved finger from the bulb of her thumb to the base of her pinky. Then, she lifts the girl to her feet, sliding an arm around Katrina’s waist, for her knees are weak with fear.

“You know, I shall be quite lonely in that grand old estate. With the _tragic_ deaths of your father and poor Sarah, I will find myself rather bored. If you would be willing to live in your father’s house once more, and keep your dear stepmother company…”

Katrina’s mind reels, repulsed by the prospect of living again under the same roof as this vile sorceress. It is all she can do to keep from squirming under the Lady’s touch.Mary’s left hand rests lightly on her hip, and despite the thick layers of Katrina’s dress, she can register an almost electric current, as if some, awful, black power were going out of the witch’s finger-tips and coursing through her veins like hellfire. More horrifying than the thought of Lady Van Tassel subjecting her to some horrid spell is the repellant realization that it is not an entirely unpleasant sensation.

The harmless white art that was Katrina’s preserve bore no resemblance to this sheer evil and darkness. 

This alien power envelops her like a great hand, made at once of the softest velvet and the hottest fire. Her body shudders, and an unbidden squeak falls from her lips.

“Yes…” Katrina breathes, sapped of energy by Mary’s sorcery. “Yes, I will stay with you. “

Lady Van Tassel untangles her fingers from the girl’s, bringing her hand up instead to caress her round, innocent face.

“And of course, you will be careful to share nothing of that which I’ve told you tonight, love?”

“I swear to God th-“

Mary giggles, eyes flashing with amusement.

“My dear, oaths made in the name of God are not particularly meaningful to me. Why don’t you swear by more pertinent powers?”

Katrina catches her stepmother’s meaning, and almost recoils in horror. Like every child in Sleepy Hollow, she had been inculcated with a deep devotion to the God her fathers had worshipped since they sailed from Holland to the Americas. She did not think her practice of white magic an affront to Christ or his father, but to do what Mary asked…. Perhaps she should reject these wicked terms, and simply resign herself to a hopefully quick death by the Horseman’s sword. Die a martyr’s death. She looks over her shoulder, even as Lady Van Tassel tightens her grip on her waist. Framed by the cellar doors stands the Hessian, dark and terrible, sword still shining in firelight. He is a figure of hell, a manifestation of darkness and death. Katrina cannot countenance dying by his hand.

So she turns back to Mary, lips trembling, as she forces out her words. Even as she says them, Katrina can almost feel a sort of purity, a virtue going out of her and scattering into the howling winds of Sleepy Hollow, like so many autumn leaves.

“I swear by all the powers of Hell that I will tell no one.”

“There’s a good girl.”

Before Katrina can react, or even breath, Lady Van Tassel leans in and presses her lips against her stepdaughter’s. The same dark power that she perceived in Mary’s touch runs through her again now, a hundred times as strong. She gasps, frozen in place, certain that any moment now her stepmother’s magic will tear through her, set her very soul alight, and melt away everything that Katrina is until she burns right down to Hell.

Then, the kiss breaks. Mary stares down at her, eyelids low, a soft smile curling her lips. The deep blue of her eyes still brims with hatred and triumph, but they are joined by something else. It is something that Katrina cannot quite put a name to, and something she does not know whether to fear or welcome.

Lady Van Tassel looks to the Hessian, still standing where she ordered him to halt. He gives no sign of any emotion. He is like a marble statue, not breathing, not moving.

“My dear soldier…you must forgive me for calling you up this night, when it seems I’ve no use for your services after all. You are dismissed.”

The Hessian turns, and Katrina thinks that even if he’d a mouth, there would be no words. Soon, he disappears down the cellar stairs, and a moment later the whinny of his horse, and the renewed thunder of hoof-beats signal his return to the Western Woods. The fierce gallop reverberates through Sleepy Hollow and the valley beyond, until finally it fades away in the distance, supplanted by the screaming wind.

Katrina buries her face in the shoulder of her tormentor, and weeps. There is no one else, after all.

* * *

A cautious sense of normalcy slowly falls over Sleepy Hollow. The Horseman’s depredations come to an end. Though the people still lock their doors, latch their windows, and carry crosses with them always, as the days pass they ceased to fear the headless rider bursting forth from the Western Woods, wild with bloodlust.

The town is temporarily rocked by the Lady Van Tassel’s apparent resurrection, but she quickly explains the circumstances surrounding her supposed death. She had been picking flowers with Sarah Van Buren, her maid, when Baltus had seen the horseman approach them, sword at the ready. Though her husband had assumed her dead, in reality only Sarah was killed, and the Lady herself had hidden in the forest, while the servant girl’s corpse was mistakenly identified as her own.

Sleepy Hollow shakes its collective head in sympathy; how tragic that the Lady has lost her husband, and poor Katrina is made an orphan.

Those who had fled in the face of the Horseman’s rampage return, once the news reaches them that their town’s curse is lifted.

At last, Sleepy Hollow emerges from the Hessian’s long shadow.

* * *

Katrina forces a smile when callers come to give their condolences for her father’s demise, and to perhaps exact a bit of payment to fulfill long forgotten debts. She keeps her bearing up as Steenwyck’s replacement, a young man named Preston delivers a heartfelt encomium in honor of Baltus and all the others who fell by the Horseman’s sword. Lady Van Tassel is at her side as the horror-weary denizens of Sleepy Hollow file out of the little church, faces dour and haunted, hardly daring to imagine their long nightmare might at last be at an end.

Men tip their hats to her as she glides down the Hollow’s only street, like a phantom. She is all but dead, after all. By law, hers is all her father’s wealth. Katrina can hardly enjoy it, unlike Mary. The widowed Lady Van Tassel is all too happy to lavish her dead husband’s gold on herself. Deliveries addressed to the Van Tassel estate pour into the Hollow; dresses from New York, Jewels from Europe, even porcelain from China. It is the most activity the dreary little hamlet has seen in its hundred and forty years of existence.

Katrina no longer touches the books of spells or the ancient, dusty parchments left by her mother. To practice such white magic, to call upon clean spirits would be a great affront. She is not worthy anymore to commune with the powers of virtue and light. Not after her complicity in Mary’s plot and by extension that of the Devil.

She hardly eats anymore, and grows thin, waif-like.

That which she most dreads is also all that she lives for anymore.

It is a sick paradox.

Night falls over the Hollow, and the alabaster moon leaps into the murky skies, to rule over her shadow-drenched kingdom until the sun bursts forth to chase her away.

The Lady Van Tassel douses all of the lanterns and extinguishes the candles. She bids farewell to any guests she might’ve received. She basks in the deep gloom of night, welcoming from the pit all of the dark agents that pierce the veil between worlds to dance beneath Diana’s watchful gaze.

Mary summons Katrina to bed and takes the girl into her arms, leaving a trail of kisses hot as hellfire down her stepdaughter’s neck and over the gentle swell of her breasts. Her dexterous, unnaturally nimble fingers undo the troublesome laces of Katrina’s bodice, and dispose of the girl’s heavy skirts. The sorceress runs her hungry hands down Katrina’s pale, nubile body, relishing the spoils of victory.

The powerful sensation Katrina first felt in the windmill all those months ago returns each night more powerful than before. For all her studies of the mystical, and her faith in things unseen, she had never imagined such a marriage between anguish and ecstasy was possible. How could the Lady’s hands deliver both the pains of Hell’s darkest circles and the pleasures of the highest heavens in the same gentle rhythms played out on her soft skin?

She shudders as Mary at last allows her white-hot desire a long-denied release, pressed so close to the Lady’s warm, voluptuous body that she fears they might become one.

Katrina will do her best to reciprocate Mary’s ministrations, but there is little hope of ever matching the witch’s dark talents.

Every night Katrina meditates on the fact that the Archer family is well and truly avenged. Their enemies lie stiff in the cold, wind-swept ground of Sleepy Hollow. Baltus is dead, and everything that was ever his is now the Lady’s. Everything. What sweeter revenge could there be, than to enjoy mastery over all the old man ever possessed or loved, even, or especially, his beloved daughter?

Mary never says anything to hint at her recognition of this fact, but her glittering eyes, so blue they might be carved from ice, say all that must be said.

There is nothing of good, nothing holy, in Katrina’s life any longer. As she and the woman who is both the architect of all her misery and the only one to alleviate it engage in the most sinful, most debauched of pleasures, she is sure of that.

Devils, demons, and other shades spat forth from the darkest depths of Hades watch over them. Light flees from the house of Baltus Van Tassel, and perhaps from all of Sleepy Hollow.

Sometimes, Katrina thinks to pray, even inclining her head in the supine posture she was taught to adopt, but she always arrests her voice before a word can be uttered. God would never hear her prayers. The God she had been taught since girlhood to fear and respect, the God who punished iniquity without mercy, would visit only wrath upon her.

And so, fearful of divine retribution, she gives herself over completely to the powers of the air. Mary laughs at her fears, plays with her golden hair, and assures her that they are well protected. The hosts of heaven, and their king, if even he exists, are powerless against the devilish guard they enjoy.

Sometimes she cups Katrina’s soft face in her cold hands, or traces the swell of her lips with a pallid finger. She calls her “my little white witch”, and the name stings because it reminds her that once perhaps there was goodness in her, before she betrayed all she loved and fell into the bed of her parents’ murderer, just to preserve her pathetic life.

When she looks into Mary’s eyes, inside her wells up a deep, black hatred she never thought herself capable of, and yet this hatred is tempered by a glow that she daren’t call love. But perhaps it is love. She has to love something, or else how could she even call herself human? Katrina wants to love her father, whose body lies moldering in the grave. She wants to love poor Brom, whose bravery and loyalty to the people of Sleepy Hollow was his greatest fault. She wants to love Ichabod Crane, gone over the valleys and hills and rivers, back to the smoke and safety of the city. She hopes he has found some sort of happiness, that he can forget this demon-haunted place and the horrors that inhabit it. Forget her.But she can love none of them, because she will receive no love in return, only pain.

So the love meant for them is granted to Mary, because she must love, and the Lady Van Tassel is all there is to love. 

Sometimes she sees young Masbath in town, and must restrain herself from reaching out to him, calling his name. He walks followed closely by a dark, nameless fury and a deep misery. His chance to revenge himself on the horseman is lost, and Ichabod who he had dared to think might replace his murdered father, is gone. Sometimes he catches her eye, and Katrina wonders if he believes her to be responsible for it all. He should. He ought to hate her.

Katrina attends Sunday services still. To her amazement, no holy barrier bars her or Mary from entering, as it did the Horseman. She and Lady Van Tassel often sit in a pew right before the Reverend’s pulpit. Katrina hangs her head in what parishioners assume is worship, but in truth is simply unbridled shame. Though she knows it is not so, she cannot help but feel that every single attendee can see past the pious masks she and Mary wear. That they can see every perversion, every wicked affront to God and nature in which the Lady Van Tassel and her stepdaughter have indulged. That they can see the grinning faces of their demonic entourage, laughing at the reverend and his sermon.

Mary holds her hand as the church belts forth hymn after hymn. The Lady does not share her lover’s compunctions. In fact, as Reverend Preston warns against falling prey to the Devil’s machinations, she cannot help but allow a brief smile to pass over her lips. She glories in her wickedness, silently laughing as she walks unnoticed amongst these good, God-fearing folk, concealing so well the truth of her nature.

Lady Van Tassel smiles at Reverend Preston after services end, thanking him for the lovely service, and praising his devotion to God and to Christ. Katrina wonders if he has even an inkling about the trysts his predecessor enjoyed with the Lady.

They return home to lights that flicker out and flare up without a human hand, and doors that are opened before them by invisible forces. There is a benefit or two, Katrina will admit, to being a witch’s mistress.

Katrina lies awake at night, her great brown eyes slowly adjusting to the dark. Mary lies by her side, sleeping soundly, breasts rising and falling with each leisurely breath. Despite her being twice Katrina’s age, she is absolutely gorgeous. Her undone blonde hair flares out in a halo around her, the curve of her hips barely suggested beneath thick blankets, full lips parted slightly as she draws and exhales chilly autumn air.

_Villainy wears many masks._

Katrina hovers somewhere between dreams and reality, somewhere between love and hatred, somewhere between heaven and hell.

There is no Ichabod anymore, no noble hero to vanquish the demons and carry the day. There is only the one who took everything from her, and who gave everything in return.

Katrina presses closer to Mary, as a draft whistles through their window, ever so slightly ajar. Mary does not wake, but does reciprocate, shifting her leg so it is beneath Katrina’s, and so Katrina slides her leg between those of her dark mistress.

They rest like that, tangled together. Bound to one another.

Face buried in Lady Van Tassel’s silky hair, soothed by the fading scent of perfume, the warm hand of sleep finally comes for Katrina.

She has a final thought before the waking world dissolves.

How strange it is that salvation and damnation could come as one.


End file.
